Silent Battle: Canadian Prisoners of War in Germany, 1914-1919

Sidney Allinson is the editor at the Royal Canadian Military Institute
and author of The Bantams: The Untold Story of World War I.

“Taken prisoner” is the last entry given in casualty lists reported
from military actions. From that moment on, POWs become mere statistics,
virtually forgotten. Such dismissal has been redressed in this most
recent book by the accomplished historian Desmond Morton, who tells us
movingly about what happened to the 3842 Canadian POWs in Germany during
the Great War. Though there is no record of how many of them attempted
to get away during those four years, it seems only one officer and 99
other ranks actually made successful escapes to freedom.

Surprisingly few, one might think, considering the fact that well
before the Nazis, German captors showed a widespread inclination to
ill-treat hapless prisoners. In fact Morton points out how First World
War POW laagers like those at Giessen and Saltau foreshadowed the
extermination camps set up at Dachau and Bergen-Belsen only two decades
later.

Life behind German wire from 1914 to 1918 was grim. Medical neglect,
torture, and starvation were officially condoned, and daily beatings
were commonplace. Perhaps even worse, Canadian POWs were employed as
slave labor. Even those who were recently wounded, sick, or
undernourished were forced to work 10 hours a day in munitions
factories, construction, farms, collieries, and salt mines, in hellish
conditions of danger, accident, and injury. Seemingly less dramatic, but
still mentally destructive in the end, was the stupefying boredom of a
“kriegie’s” daily life—the hopelessness, dull routine,
inadequate food, and constant physical violence and humiliations, at the
hands of brutal guards, for the slightest infraction of camp rules (all
in flagrant disregard of the standards for treatment of POWs that had
been adopted at the Hague Conference of 1907).

The callousness shown by the Canadian government toward returned POWs
is almost as shocking. Though our country exacted more than $20 million
in reparations from Germany, the average compensation ex-prisoners
received was a niggardly $500 each, scant help to men who had endured
years of privation, and who, in many cases, were broken in health for
the rest of their lives.

As always with Morton’s military histories, Silent Battle is superbly
researched from fresh primary sources and supported by carefully
compiled statistics and copious reference notes. Highly recommended.